We the living dead: the convoluted politics of zombie cinema.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture - The Dominion of the Dead - Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema - Book review

Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, by Annalee Newitz, Durham: Duke University Press, 183 pages, $21.95

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, by Jamie Russell, Surrey: FAB Press, 309 pages, $29.95

The Dominion of the Dead, by Robert Pogue Harrison, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 159 pages, $14

THE ZOMBIEPHILES--that odd cohort of nerds, video game addicts, and mullet-headed grindhouse nostalgists who have made the flesh-eating zombie a central figure of modern culture--know all about chewed kidneys, shambling ghouls, moldering flesh, barricaded doors, deserted streets, and the all-important bullet to the brain. But most of all, fans of the rich, vibrant zombie narrative of the late 20th and early 21st centuries know about politics.

Ever since George Romero's genre-creating Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and especially since Romero's overtly political 1978 masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, highbrow revolutionary theorizing has stalked this graveyard of lowbrow pleasures. In his 1979 study The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, the esteemed cineaste Robin Wood declared that the zombie's cannibalism "represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism." J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1983 study Midnight Movies called Night of the Living Dead "a remarkable vision of the late sixties, offering the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself." In a later reappraisal, a Village Voice critic explained that "the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam."

The film historian Sumiko Higashi went completely around the bend in a 1990 essay, declaring, "There are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead.... They constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed." As subsequent genre pictures, trailing titles like Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3, ate their way through America's VCRs, Wood elaborated his original claims, averring in his 1986 book Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan that the living dead "represent, on a metaphorical level, the whole dead weight of patriarchal consumer capitalism, from whose habits of behavior and desire not even Hare Krishnas and nuns ... are exempt." Take a bite out of that.

Two recent books belong to different strains of this wonderful critical tradition. Annalee Newitz's Pretend We're Dead, an unapologetically Marxist survey of horror films as studies in labor theory and racial politics, celebrates not only the poor zombie but also the mad scientist (cruelly alienated from the means of intellectual production) and the identity-stealing alien invader (a commodifier of family-cultural norms). Jamie Russell's Book of the Dead is more of a fan encyclopedia, but it too makes impressive claims about how Dawn of the Dead "offers us a glimpse of a universe in which all spiritual values have been replaced by our awareness of the material realities of the corporeal and consumerism."

Such readings can be silly and overdetermined, but they're mostly right. From Night of the Living Dead through Joe Dante's 2005 satire Homecoming (in which dead Iraq war veterans return from the grave to vote against the war), the zombie movie has been among the most consistently political forms in American popular culture. The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death--on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.

Russell's book helpfully explains that the word zombie didn't appear in the English language until 1889 (in a Harper's article on voodoo by Lafcadio Hearn) and did not attain currency until the 1920s, propelled by the Haitian-adventure writings of William Seabrook. Hearn and Seabrook made strong efforts to jazz up the vague tales they'd heard in the Caribbean about resurrected...